October 03, 2011

Last night's dinner involved more new ingredients. How exciting! The new-to-me ingredients last night included fish sauce and rice vinegar. Usually I just omit crazy ingredients so I don't have to buy a whole bottle to use 2 tablespoons, but I decided I make enough Thai/Asian/ethnic foods these days to just buy the whole bottle...and $100 later at Harris Teeter, I'm an authentic Asian chef.

I used this recipe as the basis for my creation but added lots of fun additional vegetables to beef up the mixture, including mushrooms, sugar snap peas, snow peas, broccoli, and bean sprouts. Btw, if you are on a strict budget and like foods that taste terrible by themselves, try bean sprouts. I got the whole bundle pictured above for only $0.09!

After quite a bit of chopping, I was ready to being by browning the ginger, onions, and garlic in some olive oil.

Brown the chicken.

Add the sauce.

Add the vegetables and watch as the pan magically plumps up with lusciousness.

Voila! Finished product.

This wasn't necessarily the fastest recipe in the world, but it was delicious, comforting, and packed with a variety of veggies.

I can't wait to make more Asian inspired dishes with my new fish sauce and rice vinegar!